hate to see you go —

Hate your friends’ Facebook posts? Now you can unfollow them

Keep your friends friended and your enemies friended but unfollowed.

Facebook has bowed to the concept of the “follow” in a change that started rolling out to profile pages Monday. It is now possible to remain friends with a person but to “unfollow” their updates, such that they no longer appear in one’s timeline.

Functionally, the unfollow button does not appear to do anything differently from what used to be unchecking the setting “show in News Feed” on someone’s profile. Facebook also used to offer a “hide all posts from [friend]” link when a user hid a single post from that person within their News Feed. Now hiding and un-showing appear to be transforming into “unfollowing,” for friends as well as pages that users have liked.

Facebook told TechCrunch that it hopes this option will encourage users to “curate their News Feeds.” Curation has become a bit of a problem for Facebook of late. The company has tried to stem the flow by automating and regulating the popularity and level of interaction that posts must have to appear on a user’s home page, to the occasional rage of brands.

Overwhelming users with too much information that they’re not interested in seems to have become an Achilles' heel for Facebook. Rather than just scrolling over John Smith’s millionth update about America’s health care system, it’s less work for Facebook if you just unfollow him entirely.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston